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Comment by Stevvo | Hacker News Reader

However you look at, it's brutality expensive. It's nearly always cheaper to drive.

That depends on a lot of factors. If you live in or around Zürich for example, the median price just to rent a parking space is CHF 200/month, or CHF 2400/yr.

For comparison, an adult GA is CHF 3860/yr, so paying for a parking space in Zürich alone puts you 2/3rd of the way to the cost of public transportation, even disregarding costs like insurance, the car itself, registration, vignette, fuel, vehicle maintenance, tyres and parking costs away from home.

Where did you get the price figure for a parking space in Zürich?

It's CHF 300 per year in a blue zone where you have to find a spot whenever you feel like parking your car.

That number was from Immoscout24 listings of parking spaces for rent [0].

If you have vacant spaces in blue zones near you, that's a viable option. There are plenty of places where that's not the case though.

[0]: https://www.immoscout24.ch/de/parkplatz/mieten/ort-zuerich

I pay 250 / month for a parking space in an underground garage. That's close to the upper limit from what I've seen. Usually, the prices start around 100-150 for a dedicated parking spot outside.

Maintaing a car (bottom line) in Switzerland hits you with a minimum of 800 Franks a month, or almost 10'000 Franks a year.

A first class Generalabonnement is virtually half the price of that.

So, no. It's certainly not cheaper to drive.

Would you mind sharing your numbers? I recently tried to figure out how much my car costs me but it was less than half of your 10'000, so I'm wondering - either I missed something, or you have a rather expensive car.

If you take the deductable tax rate per kilometer, which is 70 Rappen[0], and assume 15000 kilometers a year you get 10'500 Francs per year

If you Google the question you find a variety of answers, but I think looking at it from the tax man's perspective is a good start.

I agree that the cost nay vary, but it can also be significantly higher than 1K per month, depending on the model of car, yearly kilometers and your risk from an insurance perspective.

[0] That's the rate you can deduct from your taxable income per kilometer if you use a private car for work purposes.

Thanks, that clarifies things. The number makes sense as a rough average (which would make sense for the taxes), calling it a 'minimum' was what confused me a little.

I wouldn't be so sure. Maybe if you look just at the price of the car itself, but between parking, gas, insurance, maintenance, the actual cost can get fairly high.

I don't know about prices now, but when I lived there, if you actually needed to travel so much that the GA was worth it over the half-fare card, it definitely was worth it over the car, just on gas prices alone.

I'm from the Netherlands, living in Switzerland, and public transport prices in both countries are roughly the same. But other prices + salaries in CH are almost double the ones in NL. Also, punctuality, cleanliness and sitting space in Swiss trains is much better.

So at least comparing to NL, public transport in CH is brutally cheap.

Only if you own the car in the first place and wouldn't part with it by any mean.

Owning a car is brutally expensive.

And it might be quite a bit faster too. For example, to get to the airport from where I lived would take 3 hours by train and 2 by car.

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